Zyklon B and Penicillium C : as Auschwitz tries to eradicate one 'Fungoid Growth', Brooklyn's Pfizer bring another to worldwide prominence

Why 'Jewish Penicillin' in the world's largest Jewish city actually is penicillin !

Hitler fiercely believed the world's Jews were all evil agents bent on ceaseless cosmic dissolution, with their chief targets the world's most organic civilizations - above all the Aryan Race.

So when he hurtled the abusive term 'fungoid growths' at the Jews in one of the most famous passages from his autobiography, Mein Kampf, it had an almost literal rather than figurative meaning.

That is because it is indeed the fungus molds who are Nature's prime agents at dissolving organic material.

(Dissolving their tough chemical bonds and thus releasing their building blocks to rejoin the earth's greatest resource cycles involving elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur etc.)

The Nazis and their intellectual fellow travellers around the world were, above all, fixated on maintaining rigid social, ethnic, gender boundaries at a time of great social fluidity.

So it is not at all surprising that proto-Nazi HP Lovecraft saw the world's greatest evils as looking like shapeless, boundary-less, oozing fungal slime.

He (and the Nazis) all failed to see that their hoped-for world of total stability and non-decay/non-renewal would be lifeless in its lack of variety and so fragile that it would be likely to fail to surmount any sudden small change from outside.

So, in Nazi controlled Europe, synthetic Zyklon B gas was used to take the lives of over a million of the Jewish 'fungoid growths'.

But in the largest Jewish city of New York, in those same years, other nature-made fungoid growths were blessing the world with the life-giving gift of penicillin.

Now that's something that is almost poetic in this symmetry .....

Bottom feeders versus the Chemist in the Age of Progress

When we humans really want to verbally wound another human being, we call them 'bottom feeders' or 'slime' but it is not at all clear, at least at first glance, why these should be so abusive a term.


It is true that some lifeforms, much like the esteemed chemists who practise total synthesis, are greatly admired for making food out of the most basic of small molecules.

Others - like humans - are mere parasites who kill other animals and plants to obtain food (in the case of oysters scooped off the shell, we even eat our prey alive !)

We say we admire this behavior, but only, I suspect, because we feel compelled to publicly love everything about our species.

In fact, most of us would dearly love one day to make all of our food out of rocks, water and air --- and then eat it in the form of little white synthetic pills.

But still other lifeforms, the subject of today's post, are the bottom feeders of life.

They are Nature's bone and rag men, the garbage collectors of the ecosystem, cleaning up our collective mess by consuming dead beings and their excrement.

This feeding activity - saprotrophic nutrition - is absolutely vital to the re-cycling of the strictly limited resources of this Earth and thus the continuation of Life.

(Only daily sunshine and a light dusting of space dust is ever added to this world's resource base. Against this, every day lots of matter and energy successfully leaves this planet's gravity hold.)

It is dirty work but someone has to do, if we are all to go on living in our shiny clean suburban homes.

Nevertheless, because these detritus-eating creatures are often slimy in form and tend to live on dark, dank basement walls or in the dark dank soil, we hold them in particularly low regard : bottom feeders - slime.

Why ?

Go ask the writers of Gothic novels why - I really don't know why for certain.

Perhaps it is partly nothing more than the fact that some adults retain a childhood fear of the dark unknown.

That fear, and another dislike/fear, among those of a conservative mind,anyway, for the 'indecisive in-between liquidness and solidness and uncertainty' of things like mud and slime.

Perhaps though, in all of us, the unpleasant truth that the lifework of fungus slime presents an all too visible indication of the fact that all life ultimately dies.

And that all beauty does not just fade away and dies away but then also rots away.

We seen this Lovecraftian vum Gothic horror on the faces of the film and TV detective and the victim's families every time the loved one's body is exhumed from their grave.

The coffin top opened, the once beautiful child is nothing but an oozing mess of bones and slimy mold.

Maybe that film and TV image alone accounts why most of us so hate the fungus ---- for simply reminding us thus.

Small, weak, stupid, simple and despised ---- why in God's Name, did He allow them - and not the chemist made in His Image - to bring for the divine boon of penicillin ?

Why would He ever make the last first and the first last ????

Jesus Christ Almighty and Matthew 20 --- who knows ?! 

Plenticidal Revulsion (reductionism, reactionism) must always be simple - "terribly simple" - because Reality never is

The reaction thrown up by Plenticidal Revulsion (Lovecraftian Revulsion being the best known literary representation) must always and only seeks to see in its place a single, simple, pure vertical hierarchy and hegemony.

All others at the bottom, me at the top.

For the very idea that a plentitude of hegemonies and hierarchies can even exist along different planes of reality is what the revulser fears the most - not the competing ideas contained within those various hegemonies.

For "simple" and "single" (and "pure") are but different ways of saying the same thing, just as "complex" and "mixed " basically say the same thing.

The forcing all of reality into their 'terribly simple' procrustean bed by those most revulsed by the new plentitude accounts for virtually all the horrors done in the era of Plenticide (1870s-1960s).

And until late in 1942, Leni Reifenstahl's "Triumph of the Terribly Simple" seemed to lie within the revulsers' grasp....

Why conservatives hate slime-made antibiotics

People whose personalities are fearful, distrusting and easily disgusted (and who thus tend to think, act and vote conservatively), held up the development of naturally-made penicillin for fifteen - wasted - years between 1928 and 1943.

Chief among them : Sir Alexander Fleming and Sir Howard Florey, both who thought the stuff was best left on the shelf, until it was 100% man-made artificial.

(It never was ---- and still isn't ----- . Almost all of our antibiotics still start off as naturally grown penicillin.)

Call it the H P Lovecraft Syndrome.

Author Lovecraft was famously reactionary and racist but above all he was almost pathologically disturbed by the sight of, or thought of slime.

Slime is neither liquid or solid and as this ambiguity of being is literally made physical in its distinctive slipperiness of texture, it powerfully evokes feelings of disgust and dread in the conservative mind.

One is not surprised to learn that four times as many Republican homes have mud rooms as do Democrats, all to help out keep Mary Douglas's infamous 'matter out of place' from invading the family sanctuary.

Or that twice as many Republican couples feel the need for separate his and her sinks in their bathrooms so neither spouse has to touch the dirt of the other.

(How conservatives can even bear (bare?) to exchange intimate body slime in the act of sex, one does not know.)

It simply wasn't on to inject the poop of slime molds into the sanctity of the human bloodstream.

Because remember this was an era (error ?) that fantasized that the essence of humanity was found in the blood itself.

Not until a more relaxed and liberal individual (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) came along was impure, crude penicillin finally injected for the first time: into himself and then into two of his patients....

The poor poor pitiful slimed - always misunderstood , always maligned ...

In 1928, the year Fleming discovered and then rejected (three times) the penicillium that makes lifesaving penicillin, there were about two billion humans on the planet.

That year , tens and tens of millions of miscarriages and premature deaths were caused or hastened by bacteria and virus.

Everybody knew somebody who had died from bacteria or virus - everyone knew the primeval fear of raging epidemics.

That same year tens and tens of hundreds of people died from fungus - their individual deaths - spotted here and there almost at random- usually just seen as the result of eating 'bad' food.

Except in a few remote cultures, almost no one knew anyone who had died from fungus.

Yet in the world of cultural horrors and monsters , did we see this reality reflected at all ?

Of course not - no giant viruses or bacteria stalking the innocent maiden of movie screen and genre literature ---- it was always some faceless, shapeless, smelly, flowing, slimy gooey thing : fungus, in other words !

One suspects that this is because the virus or bacteria seems invisible ( though if we walk across the rocks of a shallow stream, the slime on the rocks is bacteria made visible).

But while most mold colonies are as equally invisible as bacteria colonies, the fungus frequently grows to highly visible sizes - easily drawfing even the bacteria colonies force feed to visible size on lab petri dishes.

In our homes or out in forests , molds easily grow big, fast, furry and slimy --- and always are extremely colorful.

The slime mold (a mold indeed as the word is understood by all but experts, just not a fungus mold) actually moves and quivers - a real life monster just waiting to be scaled up to the movie screen.

But molds are definitely the least harmful to humans of the big four of microbes life forms - more a danger to plant life than to humans and animals.

They simply are - to turn a phrase around - in sight and in mind ....

Monstrous penicillium makes Marvellous penicillin

HP Lovecraft died before injections of penicillin were freely on offer but I highly doubt he would have accepted any if they had been available.

His particular set of monsters and horrors were slippery slimy moldy thingies and the thought to him of someone voluntarily polluting their sacred human temple with the pee and poop of such terrors was literally beyond the ken.

Popular culture hasn't really moved on from Lovecraft's deepest fears -- it still sees giant gooey slimy dissolving fluid lifeforms as the most terrifying of the 'monstrous made visible'.

But once outside the movieplex, we are quite willing to have white crystal-pure 'beta lactam' antibiotics from huge factories put into our 21st century human temples - despite half-knowing that the pure white powder actually originates as the time-honored waste excretions of Lovecraft's still terrifying green slime.

Penicillin (today's all-white version anyway) seems safely far far away from the moldy smelling blue-green slime that we , doctors and patients  alike, still fear is rotting out our teenager's basement apartment and making our worksite "toxic" and "sick".

Because consistency is truly 'the hobgoblin of little minds' and we are broad minded adults here , are we not ?